Since the general opinions of large numbers of persons are almost certain to be a vague and confusing medley, action cannot be taken until these opinions have been factored down, canalized, compressed and made uniform. The making of one general will out of multitude of general wishes is not an Hegelian mystery, as so many social philosophers have imagined, but an art well known to leaders, politicians and steering committees. It consists essentially in the use of symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas.

When political parties or newspapers declare for Americanism, Progressivism, Law and Order, Justice, Humanity, they hope to amalgamate (doen samensmelten. svh) the emotion of conflicting factions which would surely divide, if, instead of these symbols, they were invited to discuss a specific program. For when a coalition around the symbol has been effected, feeling flows toward conformity under the symbol rather thans toward critical scrutiny of the measures. It is, I think, convenient and technically correct to call multiple phrases like these symbolic. They do not stand for specific ideas, but for a sort of truce (wapenstilstand. svh) or junction (verbindingspunt. svh) between ideas. They are like a strategic railroad center where many roads converge regardless of their ultimate origin or their ultimate destination. But he who captures the symbols by which public feeling is for the moment contained, controls by that much of the approaches of public opinion.

In 2012, the New York Times confirmed that the CIA was sending weapons and other military materiel into the hands of anti-Assad forces from the Turkish side of the border, using their connections with the Muslim Brotherhood to do so. However, it has also come to light that Turkish intelligence has been front and center in the ongoing campaign to arm and resupply the terror groups such as the al-Nusra Front and others. This fact was exposed by Can Dündar, the editor-in-chief of the Cumhuriyet, who now faces a potential life sentence at the behest of President Erdogan, who himself called for Dündar to receive multiple life sentences… Of course this policy of alliance with anti-Assad terrorists has been part of Turkey’s modus operandi since the beginning of the conflict. In 2012, Reuters revealed that Turkey, 'set up a secret base with allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar to direct vital military and communications aid to Syria’s rebels from a city near the border… "It’s the Turks who are militarily controlling it. Turkey is the main coordinator/facilitator. Think of a triangle, with Turkey at the top and Saudi Arabia and Qatar at the bottom," said a Doha-based source.'

This information was confirmed by Vice President Joe Biden in his spectacular foot-in-mouth speech at Harvard University where he stated:

'Our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria. The Turks were great friends… [and] the Saudis, the Emirates, etcetera. What were they doing?… They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad — except that the people who were being supplied, [they] were al-Nusra, and al-Qaeda, and the extremist elements of jihadis who were coming from other parts of the world.'

wielding total power without appearing to, without establishing concentration camps, or enforcing ideological uniformity, or forcibly suppressing dissident elements so long as they remain ineffectual. A demotion (degradatie. svh) in the status and stature of the ''sovereign people'' to patient subjects is symptomatic of systemic change, from democracy as a method of ''popularizing'' power to democracy as a brand name for a product marketable at home and marketable abroad. The new system, inverted totalitarianism, is one that professes the opposite of what, in fact, it is. The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed.'

Among the factors that have promoted inverted totalitarianism are the practice and psychology of advertising and the rule of 'market forces' in many other contexts than markets, continuous technological advances that encourage elaborate fantasies (computer games, virtual avatars, space travel), the penetration of mass media communication and propaganda into every household in the country, and the total co-optation of the universities. Among the commonplace fables of our society are hero worship and tales of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, action measured in nanoseconds, and a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose adepts are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge. Masters of this world are masters of images and their manipulation. Wolin reminds us that the image of Adolf Hitler flying to Nuremberg in 1934 that opens Leni Riefenstahl's classic film 'Triumph of the Will' was repeated on May 1, 2003, with President George Bush's apparent landing of a Navy warplane on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to proclaim 'Mission Accomplished' in Iraq…

The main social sectors promoting and reinforcing this modern Shangri-La are corporate power, which is in charge of managed democracy, and the military-industrial complex, which is in charge of Superpower. The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, public housing and so forth), and roll back the social and political ideals of the New Deal. Its primary tool is privatization. Managed democracy aims at the 'selective abdication of governmental responsibility for the well-being of the citizenry' under cover of improving 'efficiency' and cost-cutting.

In strijd met de eenvoudig te controleren werkelijkheid beweerde de Open Society Foundations van Soros op 7 april 2014 dat de uiterst gewelddadige regime-change in Oekraïne het resultaat was van 'A group of unarmed citizens' die 'rose up and overwhelmed a police force with orders to shoot to kill them. We are witnessing the birth of a new nation, a new Ukraine—with a limitless future made possible by people willing to sacrifice their lives for their country.'

Billionaire Poroshenko started his business by laundering the money of Soviet times’ administrators. He has never been an entrepreneur to start a business of his own. The story is invented. He made a head start thanks to the criminal connections of his father sentenced for large-scale theft in 1986. Having served the sentence, Poroshenko Sr. launched his own business making his son involved in the activities.

The business was dirty, it all started with the plundering of state property by armed gangs. The Poroshenko family had plans to expand the activities beyond Ukraine. Tatyana Mikoyan, a well-known Kiev-based lawyer, remembers what the family did in Transnistria,

'It was horrible back in the 1990s: illegal arms, prostitutes, drugs – all bringing profits to father and son.'

Poroshenko Sr. was awarded for his merits – in 2009 he received the Hero of Ukraine decoration bought for him by his son who was part of the inner circle of President Yushenko, Godfather to Petro Poroshenko’s children.

The President-elect is well known for misappropriating budget funds. He has the reputation of someone who knows how to make money out of thin air. Many times he has been accused of being involved in large scale corruption schemes, open lobbying, embezzlement of budget allocations, tax evasion, illegal operations to acquire shares and physically threatening political opponents and competitors. Certainly he is not just another swindler but a tycoon, an owner of huge and diversified business empire.

Forbes lists Petro Poroshenko as the 130th 'wealthiest person' in the world with 1, 6 billion dollars. In the past Poroshenko was a sponsor of Our Ukraine and Victor Yushchenko. His business empire also includes the 5th TV channel known for anti-Russian propaganda. Until recently his Roshen confectionary manufacturing group had earned hundreds of millions in US dollars making business in Russia. As of 2012, Roshen accounted for 3, 2% of Russian market (the 6th largest producer). He always used the money earned for anti-Russian projects.

The President-elect makes the return of Crimea to Ukraine and defending the country from 'outside intervention' his foreign policy priorities. It’s hard to find anything stated in concrete terms in his program. There is nothing definite there. Instead it is full of empty calls for making a 'free European state,' 'revive military might' etc. Many find his speeches repugnant, especially when Poroshenko starts telling stories about 'patriotism,' 'national unity' and 'protection of human rights.'

Petro Poroshenko is a political chameleon. This tycoon was very cynical as he went into politics. He did it for personal enrichment. He is full of ambitions and outright lust for power but lacks a professional team to work effectively or impress public. He is rather led by greed than ideas.

U.S. prescriptions have swelled by two-thirds over the past decade to 3.5-billion yearly.

About 130-million Americans… swallow, inject, inhale, infuse, spray and pat on prescribed medication every month, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates. Americans buy much more medicine per person than any other country.

The number of prescriptions has risen by two-thirds over the past decade to 3.5-billion yearly, according to IMS Health, a pharmaceutical consulting company. Americans devour even more nonprescription drugs, polling suggests. […]

More than 125,000 Americans die from drug reactions and mistakes each year, according to Associated Press projections from landmark medical studies of the 1990s. That could make pharmaceuticals the fourth-leading national cause of death after heart disease, cancer and stroke. […]

The pharmaceutical industry served up more than $250-billion worth of sales last year, the vast majority in prescriptions, according to industry consultants. That roughly equaled sales at all the country's gasoline stations put together, or an $850 pharmaceutical fill-up for every American.

We find that in our nation of Consumption Communities and emphasis on Gross National Product (GNP) and growth rates, advertising has become the heart of the folk culture and even its very prototype… They come from advertising agencies, from networks of newspapers, radio, and television, from outdoor-advertising agencies, from the copywriters for ads in the largest-circulation magazines, and so on. ‘These "creators" of folk culture -– or pseudo-folk culture -– aim at the widest intelligibility and charm and appeal.

But in the United States, we must recall, the advertising folk culture, like all advertising, is also confronted with the problems of self-liquidation and erasure.

Our folk-culture is distinguished from others by being discontinuous, ephemeral, and self-destructive. Where does this leave the common citizen? All of us are qualified to answer.

In our society, then. those who cannot lean on the world of learning, on the high culture of the classics, on the elaborated wisdom of the books have a new problem…

The characteristic folk-culture of our society is a creature of advertising, and in a sense it is advertising. But advertising our own popular culture, is harder to make into a source of continuity than the received wisdom and commonsense slogans and catchy songs of the vivid vernacular. The popular culture of advertising attenuates and is always dissolving before our very eyes. Among the charm, challenges, and tribulations of modern life, we must count this peculiar fluidity, this ephemeral character of that very kind of culture to which they have looked for the continuity of their traditions, for their ties with the past and with the future.

We are perhaps the first people in history to have a centrally organized mass-produced folk-culture. Our kind of popular culture is here today and gone tomorrow -– or the day after tomorrow. Or whenever the next semi-annual model appears! And insofar as folk culture becomes advertising, and advertising becomes centralized, it becomes a way of depriving people of their opportunities for individual and small-community expression.

Consumer goods seemed to confer glamour, leisure, and respect. This style of consumerism, so in tune with a highly diverse and mobile society, became intertwined with particular characterizations of personal ‘freedom’ and with the political culture of ‘democracy.’ Mass consumption and mass entertainment fashioned an ‘American Dream’ of upward mobility.

American-style consumerism thus fostered an ‘imagined community’ out of a population divided by language, history, and customs. During the half century between 1880 and 1930, 27 million immigrants entered the United States. In the face of this cultural multiplicity, mass production and consumption, which flowered in the generation that came of age after the First World War, presented commodities as markers of national as well as personal identity. A consumer society offered a set of common referents around which people living in the United States could bond as ‘American.’ Especially for first- and second-generation blue-collar ethnic immigrants, consumption provided a powerful Americanizing agent, with the rituals of shopping constituting a style of ‘consumer citizenship’ that rivaled older definitions of civic participation.

An expanding array of consumer goods and entertainment offered ways to shape communities of identification around comfort, leisure, and personal interests rather than around the regional, ethnic, or familial associations that once organized social life…

Innovations in the profession of advertising, directed to the domestic market and then also employed overseas, played a growing role in promoting mass consumerism's economic and cultural appeal. Especially after World War I, advertisers began to voice a refrain that soon became a hallmark of their profession: the prosperity and stability of the nation (and then of the world) depended upon their skill in stimulating ever higher levels of purchasing and consuming and therefore 0f jobs and prosperity. 'Buy More, Prosper More' became their unofficial motto.

Today 2.5 billion people, including almost one billion children, live without even basic sanitation. Every 20 seconds, a child dies as a result of poor sanitation. That's 1.5 million preventable deaths each year.

More than 80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where income differentials are widening.

The poorest 40 percent of the world’s population accounts for 5 percent of global income. The richest 20 percent accounts for three-quarters of world income.

According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty. And they 'die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.'

Around 27-28 percent of all children in developing countries are estimated to be underweight or stunted.

Brand identification -- Coca Cola, Kellogg cereals, Swift meats, White Castle hamburgers -- forged communities of consumption. Twentieth-century consumerism created an imagined community that included some and excluded others. The amusements and the products of American consumer culture redefined democracy and continually rearranged ethnic and class divisions. In the first half of the twentieth century, through their participation in the consumer republic, Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Jews slowly became ‘white’ and ‘American.’ The entertainers and advertisers who helped fuse the trinity of whiteness, nationality, and consumption into one compelling imaginary also created categories of outsiders who appeared as colored and as un- (or even anti-) American. People from African, Asian, Spanish-speaking, or Native heritage often found themselves largely excluded from the performances and displays of upward mobility and consumer nationalism.

In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.

However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.

Garment factories in the Pakistani cities of Karachi and Lahore caught fire on 11 September 2012. The fires occurred in a textile factory in the western part of Karachi and in a shoemaking factory in Lahore. The fires are considered to be the most deadly and worst industrial factory fires in Pakistan's history, killing 315 people and seriously injuring more than 250. The conditions under which Pakistan's blue-collar labour works have often been raised by trade unions and workers' rights organizations. There is also a controversial, yet wide use of child labour in Pakistan. […]

The garment factory 'Ali Enterprises,' which is located in Plot 67, Hub Road, Baldia Town, Karachi, used to export its garments to Europe and the United States, and had employed between 1,200 and 1,500 workers. Ali Enterprises manufactured denim, knitted garments, and hosiery, and had capital of between $10 million and $50 million. Workers at Ali Enterprises said they earned between 5,000 and 10,000 rupees ($52 to $104) a month for their labour. The factory manufactured jeans for textile discounter KiK. KiK claimed to control enforcement of labour laws and security standards of its suppliers. However, a security check in 2007 revealed deficiencies in fire protection of the Karachi plant, which KiK claimed were fixed by 2011. According to the Pakistani Textile Workers Union (NTUF), a high working pressure and overtime with unpayed additional work were frequent at the factory. A few weeks prior to the fire, the factory passed an internationally recognised safety test. The factory is also suspected of using child labour and locked workplaces analogous to prison cells. The owner of the factory, Abdul Aziz, had reportedly prevented inspections of the factory.

When the fashion press covers ethics it largely means whether catwalk models should eat more, rather than whether garment workers should eat.

It's tempting to cast retailers as Dickensian ogres (bullebakken. svh) but fast fashion is driven by consumer appetites. We love fashion but we also dump two million tons of textile waste (mostly clothing) in landfill each year, which suggests we don't value it. We get the type of fashion retail we deserve and ask for. We need a new plan.

On April 24, the Rana Plaza garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed, killing 1,129 workers and injuring at least 1,500 more. Most were young women earning about $37 a month, or a bit more than a dollar a day. The collapse was the worst disaster in the history of the global garment industry, evoking the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York City. The Rana Plaza factory made apparel for more than a dozen major international fashion brands, including Benetton, J.C. Penney, and Wal-Mart. This was the third major industrial accident in Bangladesh since November, when 112 people were killed in a fire at a garment factory producing mainly for Wal-Mart. At Rana Plaza, cracks appeared in the eight-story building the day before it collapsed. Police ordered an evacuation of the building. But survivors say they were told that their pay would be docked if they did not return to the factory floor, and most did.

the governing elites in business and finance as well as government, regardless of political preference, operate on bleaker assumptions about the human condition. High-minded stewardship, they tell themselves, requires a rather constant manipulation of the soft-headed populace, deftly steering the people toward correct outcomes, even if people are too stupid to understand their own best interests.

What’s worse is that many ordinary Americans –- maybe most of them -– believe this too. At least, many have internalized from experience the notion that they have been assigned lesser roles in the grand scheme and there’s nothing to be done about it. Like it or not, the obstacles are simply too formidable to overcome. The frontier is closed; the pioneering is history. This self-doubt and resignation may be the greatest barrier to realizing an alternative future, one in which people at large can participate from their various angles in the decisions that govern their lives.

The privatization of public services and functions manifests the steady evolution of corporate power into a political form, into an integral, even dominant partner with the state. It marks the transformation of American politics and its political culture from a system in which democratic practices and values were, if not defining, at least major contributing elements, to one where the remaining democratic elements of the state and its populist programs are being systematically dismantled.

Kenmerkend daarbij is dat,aangezien de democratie 'represented a challenge to the status quo, today it has become adjusted to the status quo.' In een recensie van Wolin's boek Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (2008) schreef de Amerikaanse geleerde Chalmers Johnson:

One other subordinate task of managed democracy is to keep the citizenry preoccupied with peripheral and/or private conditions of human life so that they fail to focus on the widespread corruption and betrayal of the public trust. In Wolin's words,

'The point about disputes on such topics as the value of sexual abstinence, the role of religious charities in state-funded activities, the question of gay marriage, and the like, is that they are not framed to be resolved. Their political function is to divide the citizenry while obscuring class differences and diverting the voters' attention from the social and economic concerns of the general populace.' […]

Another elite tactic of managed democracy is to bore the electorate to such an extent that it gradually fails to pay any attention to politics. Wolin perceives,

'One method of assuring control is to make electioneering continuous, year-round, saturated with party propaganda, punctuated with the wisdom of kept pundits, bringing a result boring rather than energizing, the kind of civic lassitude on which managed democracy thrives.'

The classic example is certainly the nominating contests of the two main American political parties during 2007 and 2008, but the dynastic 'competition' between the Bush and Clinton families from 1988 to 2008 is equally relevant. It should be noted that between a half and two-thirds of qualified voters have recently failed to vote, thus making the management of the active electorate far easier. Wolin comments,

'Every apathetic citizen is a silent enlistee in the cause of inverted totalitarianism.' […]

Managed democracy is a powerful solvent for any vestiges of democracy left in the American political system, but its powers are weak in comparison with those of Superpower. Superpower is the sponsor, defender and manager of American imperialism and militarism, aspects of American government that have always been dominated by elites, enveloped in executive-branch secrecy, and allegedly beyond the ken (horizon. svh) of ordinary citizens to understand or oversee. Superpower is preoccupied with weapons of mass destruction, clandestine manipulation of foreign policy (sometimes domestic policy, too), military operations, and the fantastic sums of money demanded from the public by the military-industrial complex. (The U.S. military spends more than all other militaries on Earth combined. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion; the next closest national military budget is China's at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.)

Foreign military operations literally force democracy to change its nature:

'In order to cope with the imperial contingencies of foreign war and occupation,' according to Wolin, 'democracy will alter its character, not only by assuming new behaviors abroad (e.g., ruthlessness, indifference to suffering, disregard of local norms, the inequalities in ruling a subject population) but also by operating on revised, power-expansive assumptions at home. It will, more often than not, try to manipulate the public rather than engage its members in deliberation. It will demand greater powers and broader discretion in their use ('state secrets'), a tighter control over society's resources, more summary methods of justice, and less patience for legalities, opposition, and clamor for socioeconomic reforms.'

Imperialism and democracy are, in Wolin's terms, literally incompatible, and the ever greater resources devoted to imperialism mean that democracy will inevitably wither and die. He writes,

'Imperial politics represents the conquest of domestic politics and the latter's conversion into a crucial element of inverted totalitarianism. It makes no sense to ask how the democratic citizen could ''participate'' substantively in imperial politics; hence it is not surprising that the subject of empire is taboo in electoral debates. No major politician or party has so much as publicly remarked on the existence of an American empire.'